Since you are my rock and my fortress, for the sake of your name lead and guide me.
~Psalm 31:3

Huldra Forsvant (Theodor Kittelsen)

Huldra Forsvant (Theodor Kittelsen)

Tuesday, November 26, 2013

Social Media'd To Death

What do you think about this whole LinkedIn business? Trying to be hip and nowish, I signed up a fair while back, and have been obligingly asking people to be my friend connection. I'm not exactly sure what I'm doing this for though. To be honest I don't know if I really want any more connections in my life. Is that bad?

It would all be harmless and not annoying enough if that was that. But no, 70% of my email inbox seems to consist of some kind of uninteresting LinkedIn stuff. So and so has made 4 new friends connections. Wow. My day is now made. I know I'm being surly. Maybe if I was looking for a job it would all be very wondrous and life-saving. But for now it's just kind of annoying. Am I alone in this annoyance? Is LinkedIn actually a brilliant thing that I should be enjoying?

And then there's that Google+ thing I unwittingly signed up for a while back. No idea what that is either. But I do feel very up to date with the knowledge of so and so's new friend, um, er connection, opps I mean circle.

7 comments:

I'm the opposite of you - I avoid signing up to as much as possible, for weird they-stress-me-out-too-much reasons.

I get lots of 'so and so wants to connect with you on LinkedIn' emails, though, and it always makes me feel a little guilty just ignoring them. I never know whether I should write a little note to So and So to tell them that I'm not *against* connecting with them, I just don't want to join up to something new, for weird they-stress-me-out-too-much reasons. I hope they're just automated emails and that if I delete mine, So and So won't receive an email saying 'Belle does NOT want to connect with you'...

Hello connect. I went on Linkedin about 2 months ago. So that I would look like a professional to future employers, for some reason. I accept requests but I have no idea what the point of it is. What does it do? What do I do with it? I kind of like that all my friends have impressive job titles so they look like high-powered people so I look like a high-powered person by association, but other than that it's boring. I'm struggling to come up with a powerful job description.

LinkedIn is actually extremely powerful depending on your profession and how you use it - and use your profile (there's specific ways you need to market your profile to get the full benefit). It's changing (and has changed) the way recruiting in many professions is handled - it's actually made many a recruiting firm (and recruiter) redundant now as firms take their recruiting in-house to save money and use LinkedIn.